1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer program product, system, and method for migrating device management between object managers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how managed elements in a network environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them are represented to allow for the consistent management of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider. CIM allows multiple parties to exchange management information and to provide for the active control and management of the managed elements operating in a network environment, often including heterogeneous devices and elements from different manufactures. The goal of the common model is to allow for management software to be written once and work with many implementations of the common model without complex and costly conversion operations or loss of information.
In a CIM environment, any CIM client can talk to any CIM compliant managed element and entity in order to configure and manage the latter. With the widespread acceptance of CIM as a management standard, many of the vendors are providing CIM instrumentation for managing their devices. Vendor devices expose the management information through a software module called a CIM Agent. The CIM agent is either embedded in the device hardware or externally installed and configured to point to the managed device to report the management information. One CIM agent can report management information of multiple devices based on the configuration settings. CIM agent software is a set of software modules called CIM Providers that are plugged into a Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM).
Cloud computing is Internet based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like a public utility. Cloud computing infrastructure consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers. Clouds often appear as single points of access for consumer computing needs. With the advent of global public clouds/community clouds, multiple data centers comprised of a multitude of managed devices are evolving. Many of the cloud systems use the standard Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) protocol components, such as a CIMOM, to manage devices in the cloud.
In current CIMOM managed clouds, a failure of a CIMOM managing various entities may terminate the management of the underlying management entities. In such case, another CIMOM must be provisioned to manage the device, which requires manual configuration, which increases the failure time for which the device is not manageable, also known as the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF).
CIMOM plays a vital role in both compute clouds (SaaS) as well as infrastructure clouds (IaaS) by enabling the cloud provider to manage the consolidated shared infrastructure. A failure of a CIMOM in a cloud spanning across multiple data centers which potentially have thousands of managed devices could result in the inaccessibility of all the numerous devices managed by the CIMOM. A CIMOM failure may impact the availability of cloud services and reduce service to the point where a service level agreement (SLA) is violated.